Central authorities are typically simpler than gossip and consensus systems. They have failure modes too, of course, but those failure modes are better understood and potentially easier to manage.
Sometimes you can't avoid the need for distributed consensus, but you can box it inside a well defined abstraction like leader election, and then do everything else in a traditional client-server way.
Sometimes you can't avoid the need for distributed consensus, but you can box it inside a well defined abstraction like leader election, and then do everything else in a traditional client-server way.